Let’s talk about this new lightsaber. About a minute into the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, a cloaked figure is tromping through a snowy forest and ignites a weird-looking lightsaber: it’s big, sort of flickery, and it has a crossbar.

We're still months away from the debut of the fifth season of Game of Thrones, but the tantalizing hints about what's to come have already begun. First up is a brief video snippet featuring Arya Stark. She broods, she stabs, and she dashes through the shadows to the tune of Melisandre's ominous words: "I see a darkness in you." It's all very menacing and as yet indeterminate (at least for those of us who haven't read the books), though it seems to mark only the start of a series of such snippets, which will be distributed to fans who visit the newly introduced Three Eyed Raven website. Its sole purpose for now is to sign people up to receive updates via Twitter DM or text message. The small print on the SMS signup page requires consent to receive up to 15 texts, so there are clearly plans to keep trickling out information throughout the cold, dark winter that is to come.

Google staked a claim in one of the most ad-saturated neighborhoods in the world this week with a billboard the width of a city block. After signing a long-term deal with Vornado Realty Trust reportedly worth millions, the company began advertising on the biggest billboard in New York City's Times Square — over 20 million pixels big.

The Mitsubishi Electric screen occupies the entire block of Broadway that lies between 45th and 46th street, and even wraps about another 30 feet around each corner. Its true resolution is 2,368 x 10,048, and it measures over 77 feet tall by 323 feet long. It will reportedly be under Google's control until the end of January 2015.

What can you do in 30 seconds? If it’s an advertisement for the Surface, the answer is: a lot. For the past two years, Microsoft has been showing the tablet running the full version of Office, editing photos in Adobe Photoshop, and converting into either a tablet or a notebook on the fly. But one thing Microsoft hasn’t been able to do very well in 30 seconds is explain why the Surface needs a stylus, which in an era of stroking our screens has long seemed antiquated.